


last one standing

by americanleaguer



Category: Baseball RPF, Sports RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-13
Updated: 2010-11-13
Packaged: 2017-10-13 04:51:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/133147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/americanleaguer/pseuds/americanleaguer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Please note that while there are mentions of non-consensual sex in this fic, you only see the effects of it on the characters; the act itself occurs 'off-screen' and is not detailed in the story.  There is one on-screen scene where consent is dubious.  I would not really consider this a <i>rape/non-con</i> fic, but I am tagging it with that warning on the theory that it's better to overwarn than to underwarn.  If you are easily triggered, I would suggest avoiding this story.  If you simply wish to avoid extremely graphic rape, you are probably fine to proceed.</p><p>This was originally posted <a href="http://americanleaguer.livejournal.com/21697.html">here at LJ</a>.  There have been some small changes made from that version, mostly structural or grammatical.  There have been no major alterations.</p><p><b>Disclaimer:</b>  This is a work of <b>fiction</b>.  It is in no way a reflection on the actual life, behavior, or character of any of the people featured, and there is no connection or affiliation between this fictional story and the people or organizations it mentions.  It was not written with any intent to slander or defame any of the people featured.  No profit has been or ever will be made as a result of this story:  it is solely for entertainment.  And again, it is entirely <b>fictional</b>, i.e. <b>not true</b>.</p>
    </blockquote>





	last one standing

**Author's Note:**

> Please note that while there are mentions of non-consensual sex in this fic, you only see the effects of it on the characters; the act itself occurs 'off-screen' and is not detailed in the story. There is one on-screen scene where consent is dubious. I would not really consider this a _rape/non-con_ fic, but I am tagging it with that warning on the theory that it's better to overwarn than to underwarn. If you are easily triggered, I would suggest avoiding this story. If you simply wish to avoid extremely graphic rape, you are probably fine to proceed.
> 
> This was originally posted [here at LJ](http://americanleaguer.livejournal.com/21697.html). There have been some small changes made from that version, mostly structural or grammatical. There have been no major alterations.
> 
>  **Disclaimer:** This is a work of **fiction**. It is in no way a reflection on the actual life, behavior, or character of any of the people featured, and there is no connection or affiliation between this fictional story and the people or organizations it mentions. It was not written with any intent to slander or defame any of the people featured. No profit has been or ever will be made as a result of this story: it is solely for entertainment. And again, it is entirely **fictional** , i.e. **not true**.

Wind whips through the park like a knife through water, whistling a little at the corners. Foulke flips up the collar of his jacket and whistles through his teeth right back at it, bunching his hands up into his sleeves and jamming them into his pockets. It's altogether too cold to be baseball season, really, there ought to be a law. The start of the season should be variable, like wild animal breeding time or something, not that he knows anything about that. He would ask Timlin, maybe, but Timlin is on the mound, high red socks scissoring through the air with a crowdful of eyes on him.

Foulke squints against the cold and peers out at the stands. The fans look raw and miserable, some of them bundled in almost full winter gear, their cheeks red and their noses running. It makes him smile, a hard kind of sarcastic grin. Serves them right. Arrogant little judgmental bastards.

A ball bursts up from homeplate, rising into the sky on a high familiar arch, and Foulke tracks it down with his eyes into Wily Mo's waiting glove in center. The leather pockets around it and Timlin waits at the mound to pat him thankfully on the ass as he passes before following him into the dugout.

Foulke twists his hands in his pockets, drums his heels on the ground. The kid's been warming all inning, his fastball thumping neatly in the bullpen catcher's glove, and Foulke isn't getting into this one.

\---

The kid. The damn kid, with his easy smile and his pugged nose, with his stupid fucking mohawk followed, chronologically, by his stupid bald head. The fans love the kid. He'd saved all of two games when Foulke started seeing #58 jerseys in the stands, usually on girls, the fresh young college girls that Foulke himself used to be able to bag in this damn town. Pickings have been slimmer, of late, although he finds that his ring will get him something good if he's desperate enough to go out with it on. That’s a fact he thinks will never change here. Still, he's found himself taking home the kind of girls he used to joke about, the girls they call _Expiration Dates_. Past their prime.

The kid can have any girl he wants, pretty much, at least within city limits where he's freely recognized. Youkilis has started hanging around with him as much as he can, a sure sign that the kid is pulling some fine tail, because Youkilis is the ultimate vulture, following behind his more successful and attractive teammates, taking their leavings. Youkilis used to hang out with Foulke, last season, the season before, but Foulke hasn't heard from him the past four weekends, and doesn't think he will.

"Mrs. Damon" shirts in the crowds disappeared with record speed, but Foulke's starting to sight "Mrs. Papelbon" shirts here and there. It's enough to make a guy sick to his stomach, but at least Foulke is used to that.

\---

For all the talk about Boston, in 2004, shedding the 25-guys-25-cabs lines that have followed them for so long, all the newspaper inches dedicated to stories about how goddamn close they'd all gotten on that team-- it was never like that, not really. There was some fun in the clubhouse, sure, but it's not as though the whole team was hanging out together outside of the ballpark, showing up at each other’s houses for potluck dinners and all knowing each other’s favorite drinks.

He preferred to work the bars on his own, but sometimes with Youkilis, sometimes with Wade Miller; that was about the extent of Foulke’s baseball social network in Boston, although he had tried going out with Manny one night, later vowing never again. They ended up in some girl’s apartment, Foulke trying to catch Manny’s eye to get him to hurry up and pick one, and all of a sudden there was salsa music on and Manny and the girls were dancing in their socks on the wood floor, Foulke left sitting on the couch half-hard and wondering if he’d fallen into some sort of awful parallel universe where nothing meant what he thought it did.

He hasn’t gone out with any of the guys yet this season, existing in a kind of sullen semi-world between the park and his apartment, dark wet Boston roads gleaming yellow at night his lifeline between the two. Papelbon with the save wants to celebrate, though, and the kid is too golden to be denied.

“Let’s go to a bar, you guys, that was a good one, we all did good,” the kid is excited, bright-eyed and alert. Timlin mutters some excuse about his wife and disappears, but everyone else is stuck under the kid’s gaze like moths under a pin.

Foulke sullenly sticks his neck under the shower, even though he doesn’t have to, didn’t pitch or anything, but he’s chilled enough from the mist in the night air that a hot shower seems necessary. He takes as much time as he can, hoping that the kid will get impatient and take the rest of the bullpen and go.

Of course the kid is just as happy to wait as he is about anything.

Foulke shrugs on his jacket and sticks his hands in the pockets, his breadwinners, protecting the joints from the cold. He supposes that if he disappointed the kid it would be a crime against the team, the sort of thing that Francona would pull him aside for and scream at him about. There’s no getting out of it.

DiNardo is already talking in a loud, constant patter, and Foulke can feel a headache prowling in the back of his skull. It was a long game, and it’s going to be an even longer night.

\---

The kid has a habit of grinding his teeth when he pitches. He’s never really been a closer before, not like this, not in Boston with a whole city, a whole state, a whole region hanging on his every twitch, and the stress is getting to him, even if it’s only unconsciously. Every save he makes keeps him perfect and untouchable, and every time he stretches out that thinning taffy of perfection he feels the stress more keenly. He’s taken to holding a hot-pack to his cheeks after games, alternating sides every few minutes, warming his jaw to loosen the muscles.

Foulke really couldn’t give a shit about the kid and the state of his teeth. He only knows any of this because Francona has seen fit to tell him, approaching him as though Foulke will want to be a friendly, helpful big brother to the snot-nosed upstart who’s taken his job.

“Foulkie,” Francona always calls him Foulkie, no matter how many times Foulke tells him that isn’t his fucking name, “Foulkie, Pap’s just having a little stress over all this, he’s never done nothin’ like it before and the kid ain’t used to it. I was thinkin’, you’re more than used to it, what you did for us in the postseason, man, you were nails, I was thinkin’ you could show him a thing or two and he’d benefit from it a damn lot.”

 _If I was such_ nails, Foulke thinks sharply, _why the fuck isn't it me doing the closing_.

He nods to Francona, sure, have a chat with the kid. Tell him what it’s like to be a closer in your heart as much as in your arm. Tell him it’s not all velocity, it’s not all location. Tell him how to block out and bear down and shrug everything off your back, water from the wing feathers of a duck. Tell him in an hour what it took Foulke years and years to figure out on his own. Tell him what Foulke learned in hundreds of weight rooms and in the backs of a hundred dusty buses and in a thousand sleepless nights at 20,000 feet, in dozens of different cities, with trainers and coaches and teammates and without, but always with his own two hands and his own two arms and his own two feet and his own head and his own heart.

Right. Sure.

He nods and never talks to the kid. Francona doesn’t bring it up again. Foulke doesn’t know if Francona doesn’t know, or realizes what he was asking, or is giving up on Foulke as a bad job. Foulke doesn’t care. He’s got to have something left, something he can cling to, and he’ll be damned if he’ll give it away.

\---

Water condenses on the side of his glass of beer, beading slow of its own accord, sliding warmly down the edges to seep into the cardboard coaster at the bottom. Foulke draws his fingertips through it and rests his elbow on the bartop, holding his hand up to see the light of the neon Budweiser sign glint sickly red in the wetness, reflecting his headache back at him.

There’s a racket down at the end of the bar where the rest of the bullpen has entrenched themselves. DiNardo is boasting loudly to Tavarez that he can drink the most hard liquor the fastest and everyone else is betting on it. Not real bets of course, most of them are too careful to even blur that line. They’re betting in scraps of IOU paper and snack pack duty for the upcoming road trip. It seems like a pretty good match-up to Foulke, frat boy drinking power set against the power of belligerent craziness, odds about even as far as he can see, but he’s not betting. He’s not even sitting with them, hunched instead over a stool halfway up the bar, fiddling with the sweat of his beer and pointedly pretending he came alone.

He’s surprised, then, when the kid slides up behind him and slaps a hand down on his shoulder. Foulke starts up before realizing who it is and grumping back down into his slumped posture. The kid’s hand is drunk-heavy on his shoulder and even though he shrugs irritably the kid doesn’t seem inclined to move it.

To his infinite annoyance, the kid hauls himself up onto the neighboring stool, hand still deadweighted on Foulke’s shoulder, and signals for another beer. The bartender slides one over without even paying attention to what it is. It doesn’t matter, because the kid never pays for his own drinks these days. If no one in the bar recognizes him, the bartender (a native, always a thick-voiced native so far as Foulke can tell, and he wonders if there’s perhaps a law that says in order to be a bartender in the city of Boston you have to have lived there for a minimum number of generations) certainly will, and anything the kid drinks will be paid for in full or, just as often, on the house.

“Y’should hang with the guys!” he grins, scattered and friendly. Foulke groans inwardly. He forgets, in not hanging out with these new young arms, how easily they fall into their alcohol.

“Go on back, kid, you’ll miss the contest and you won’t collect on that bet even if you win.”

“Wan’ have fun with you!” Papelbon chirps, and Foulke recalls that the kid doesn’t know much at all about betting, manifestly evidenced by the mohawk incident. He’s still not sure how saving a certain number of games meant that Youkilis got free reign with the kid’s scalp, but Foulke’s pretty sure it’s the sort of thing that could only happen to someone who didn’t know shit about bets. Or, he supposes, about Youkilis. Either way, it had all ended up in a hideous mohawk, which lasted until the kid’s wife (Foulke, his own divorce still freshly bitter on his tongue, gives it another 8 months) got fed up and made the kid shave his head bald.

It’s when this same bald head, now slightly fuzzed, starts dropping down onto Foulke’s shoulder that he knows the kid is done for the night. He grabs him by the back of his shirt and secures a massive handful of fabric, enough to pull the front of the kid’s shirt tight across his chest. Foulke blinks briefly at the muscles thus exposed, forgetting for a moment, in his mental insistence on Papelbon’s youth, that the kid is built more like a major leaguer than a proper kid. Hell, he’s already more strongly built than Matt Clement, although that’s not saying much.

Shaking his own head to clear it, Foulke drags the kid outside. The temptation to leave him unconscious in a bar bathroom is very strong, a delicious sort of thought to savor, but Foulke has no illusions about his place on the team. He’s fully aware that someone will tell Francona that he was out with the rest of the bullpen, and somehow it will become his fault for not getting the precious golden boy home in one piece, because he’s a veteran, and who else is there? A bunch of callow triple-A call-ups, plus Julian Tavarez, and no one would expect Julian Tavarez to take responsibility for a potted plant, let alone another person.

Sometimes Foulke catches himself wishing he had cultivated a certain level of crazy as effectively as Tavarez has, but then he sees Tavarez with his eyes bugging out, snarling at a towel that missed the laundry cart when thrown, and he decides it’s all for the best.

He shoves the kid unceremoniously up against the side door of his truck and steps back to fish in his pocket for his keys, grumbling to himself at the unfairness of it all. There’s a soft thump and he looks up to see that the kid has kind of collapsed to his knees between Foulke and the truck. He hadn’t thought the kid was _that_ drunk. Foulke rolls his eyes up to the sky, blank expanse turned yellowpink with light pollution hanging in the midnight mist, and reaches down to haul the kid upright again.

Except, instead of allowing himself to be pulled up, the kid grabs hold of Foulke’s hand. Foulke looks down at him, surprised, and is unnerved to see the kid looking up at him with a weird smile on his face. It’s a little trembling at the corners and a little soft at the middle and the light isn’t very good. Foulke doesn’t bother trying to read the kid normally, and he can’t read him at all right now.

The kid leans forward, unfamiliar smile still aimed upwards, and dexterously undoes Foulke’s belt with one hand.

Foulke yelps and jumps backwards, sending the kid sprawling forward onto the pavement. He grabs at his belt and hastily looks around, god, what if someone was in the parking lot and _saw_ that? What if they thought something was going on? They’re both public figures, closers past and present, and that’s not exactly a low-profile job in this region. What the _fuck_ does the kid think he’s playing at?

The kid sits up and wipes his palms against each other, gravel raining from between his hands, swaying slightly. It must be painful and it could be trouble for his pitching if he has to get in the next night’s game, but Foulke really could not give a shit about that. He rebuckles his belt and keeps one hand on it, protectively, approaching the kid and watching him closely as though he’s a bomb that might go off if not handled properly.

“Wan’ have fun with you,” Papelbon says, again, eyes closed and that smile, which Foulke now recognizes as a drunken attempt at seduction, still hitched onto his face. “Lemme show you.” _Fun_. Christ. He hadn’t even known the kid was into that shit.

Wordlessly, he grabs the kid under one arm and drags him upright. He turns him around and plants a hand in the center of his back, slamming him into the door to hold him in place and out of the way while he digs for his keys again.

The little fucker wriggles under his hand and turns his head sideways, cheek smooshed against the window of the truck. “’K,” he slurs, almost _purring_ , “we can play that way if y’want.”

Foulke chokes a little and stiffens his arm to stay as far away from the kid as possible. He finally finds his keys and unlocks the truck, shoving the kid in and buckling him into the seat as hastily as he can, with as little contact as possible. He slams the door and takes a moment alone in the parking lot to breathe, deep and regular.

After he manages to get the kid to tell him his address, he drives there as fast as he can, ignoring road signs and slamming down on the gas when he sees yellow in front of him. He squeals to a stop in front of the house, hauls Papelbon out of the truck and dumps him in a heap on his front stoop. The kid pets his shoe and giggles. Foulke toes him softly in the ribs and jabs at the doorbell a few times, figures it’s enough to wake up the kid’s wife.

He just walks away. It’s no longer his problem. He’s leaving a star pitcher lying in an inebriated little mound, palms scraped up with black gravel and grime, for his young wife to discover and somehow, somehow he’s going to get yelled at for it, but he never asked to be a babysitter or anything else where Papelbon was concerned.

His relief as he drives home is so strong that it almost blinds him. He has to pull over along the highway, cars whizzing by in streaks of white and red like a long-exposure photograph while he rests his forehead on the steering wheel, panting almost hysterically. He doesn’t even know why.

\---

Once, two seasons before, during that magical year, Foulke had been in the showers at the wrong time. It wasn’t his fault, he usually showered with the rest of the team as a matter of course, but Francona had pulled himself aside to discuss some finer points of his pitching, and how long he thought he would be able to keep it up. Foulke was in pain, unsteady knees and a worrying grind under the bone caps, but in those days that wasn’t anything, he was determined and invincible.

Reassuring Francona had taken time, though, and when he finally made it into the showers most of the team had already gone. He was standing under the spray, turned down to as cold a stream as he could stand it to blast the game from his skin, when his head jogged at a strange sound. It was a wet, heavy sort of sound, the kind of sound that made him immediately nervous even though he couldn’t exactly place it.

Wiping the soap from his eyes, he tentatively poked his head out of the showers and had been treated to the sight of Kevin Millar bent over a bench with Manny Ramirez busily burying himself in his ass.

Foulke had stared for a full minute in shock before ducking back into the shower and turning the temperature all the way up, trying to scald the sight out of his mind.

He wrapped a towel around his waist and walked right past them on his way out, ignoring them as firmly as he could and moving at a dignified, unhurried pace, because he was damned if he was going to be freaked out of his own fucking clubhouse.

When he realized he had forgotten his watch and had to pass them again before he could leave, Millar was biting his own hand and squealing around it, and Manny looked up as he walked by.

Foulke had stared at him, trying very hard to not say anything.

Manny grinned, gave him a jaunty double point, and then went back to his business.

There wasn’t anything Foulke could do or say, because they were winning at that point and you never fuck with the luck, even if the luck involves a worrying exchange of bodily fluids between two teammates. And they had gone on to win it all, so he supposed maybe there _was_ something in it, in terms of luck.

Millar is an Oriole now, still calling everyone up and leaving incoherent messages on their voicemails at strange hours of the night, living for games in Boston, sheepish in orange and black, so Foulke had assumed that that was the end of that, and he hadn’t thought about it since. Hadn’t really thought that it was something people _did_ , in baseball. At the time it struck him as a Manny and Millar thing, a weird little bit of their friendship that belonged to them alone, in the unique pressure-cooker environment of the playoffs. That made sense, because they were never Manny and Millar so much as they were MannyMillar, all for one and one for all, a pair in every way, unique in that. And everything got a little crazy, off-kilter, during the playoffs.

The idea of _one_ , of one guy being interested in that all his own, it baffles Foulke. Catches him off-guard. Manny and Millar had done, well, _that_ because they were two together-- it was like they egged each other on into it, mutually encouraged each other into a spiral of crazy that ended with someone's cock in someone else's ass. Papelbon, so far as Foulke can tell, has no one on the team like that.

He’s just. Well. Apparently _gay_. All on his own.

Or, Foulke supposes, bi, unless the wife is a much more long-suffering individual than he’d given her credit for.

Still, the kid was drunk and Foulke doesn’t really think, when he gets home and calms down and looks at it rationally, that it’s something he’s going to have to worry about in the future. He revises his mental estimation of the length of the kid’s marriage to 5 months and otherwise does what he can to put the incident out of his mind.

\---

Beckett is throwing the kind of high heat that Foulke could never dream of, sickeningly overpowering. The Rangers are baffled, all those big bats swinging emptily through warm dry air. It’s a do-nothing kind of day in the bullpen, the starter looking like he won’t be needing much help, the weather hot enough to keep anyone from wanting to move any more than they absolutely have to. Foulke sprawls on the bench, his legs sticking far out to keep bodyheat away from his core, a towel soaked in cold water evaporating fast, draped around the back of his neck.

It’s so hot that he doesn’t even have the energy to work up a disparaging remark when the kid plops down next to him and offers a cup of cold Gatorade. Foulke drinks it quickly, before the Texas air can leech the coolness from it, and he can feel it running down in the center of his chest like an icy hand stroking under his breastbone.

“You’re married, right?” the kid asks, apropos of nothing. Foulke hesitates and shoots him a look. He’s pretty fucking sure that the kid knows exactly what his marital state is, he knows it was discussed all over the clubhouse last season, the sort of amazing mess that other ballplayers like to talk about, in a relieved ‘at least it isn’t me’ sort of way.

“Divorced,” he grunts, shortly. The question, he decides, doesn’t deserve much more than that.

“How come?"

He shrugs one shoulder casually. It’s the same reason any baseball wife in the league could legitimately divorce her husband if she wanted to, nothing new in that department.

“Slept around, huh?” The kid is drumming his heels on the ground under the bench and looking expectantly at Foulke, who rolls his eyes and gives a brisk nod in confirmation. Christ. Of course he fucking slept around. The city loves its baseball players and the college population is enormous, it’s a fortuitous fucking combination for a guy who likes to have a little fun.

Teixeira hits a long, high fly ball that captures their attention for a moment, but they track it harmlessly into Trot’s glove in right. On the mound, Beckett pumps his fist and shouts. In the bullpen, Foulke is too warm and languid to move even when the kid, eyes ostensibly hooked on the arching ball, grabs his shoulder and squeezes familiarly.

Foulke just closes his eyes and waits for it, like the pain in his knees and the sullenness in his heart, to go away.

\---

He doesn’t really hate baseball, not like it’s been made to seem, the way the media has quoted him. They make it sound like he plays baseball only for the paycheck, pure mercenary, someone who would rather be playing hockey and treats this, the ultimate American fantasy for every man and many women, as simple vulgar rote.

That’s not it at all. He just, with things as they were (are), doesn’t take the same kind of uncomplicated joy in it that someone like, say, Ortiz does. He doesn’t even have the deliberate sort of love for baseball that Schilling does. He doesn’t feel destined for it, like Delcarmen, or immersed in it, like Varitek. Baseball doesn’t amaze him like it does Loretta, and he doesn’t have half as much fun with it as Manny does.

Baseball _is_ a job, but it’s his job, and he loves it as much as he loves anything he can do well, anything at which he might happen to succeed. When they were winning and he was untouchable, Christ, you would have had to be an idiot to say that Keith Foulke didn’t love baseball.

It’s this degrading bench-riding, though, this forced semi-exile, this constant rolling soreness in his knees. It drags a guy down. It makes him incapable of looking past the next paycheck, because there’s nothing else to look forward to. And Foulke’s never been one to censor his thoughts, and in this city, fuck, make one honest comment and you’ll never hear the end of it until you’re fairly run out of town, and again every time you come back to play against the home team, and again in the between-times when local writers are short of ready material.

Boston holds grudges. They’re fucking _proud_ of it. Back when he used to wander around town, still amazed by the sort of city he’d landed himself in, Foulke had walked past all the signs of it. The Boston Tea Party boat, a historical grudge if he ever saw it. Logan Airport in the hazy distance, runways spidering off the impossible little island, a great big fuck-you to common sense. The roads that ran contrary to any semblance of reason, a grudge against every out-of-town driver who ever dared to venture within the city limits.

But if the city can hold a grudge, well, so can he. He’s bound by the terms of his contract and nicety, society and business, he can’t do anything, not exactly. But if Papelbon is going to take his job, he’s not going to forget it. And he’s not going to forgive it.

It’s the city passing on a little bit of its own character to its unwanted children. It’s natural. Let the city color those who move within it, that’s always been Foulke’s way of thinking, when in Rome and all that, and there’s no reason to go changing now. He’ll show them how it’s done.

\---

Another day, another win, another Papelbon save. The kid sidles up to Foulke in the locker room and intrudes with a hand on the side of Foulke’s locker, real casual.

“Bunch of us goin’ to the bar after this, you want in?”

“Nuh,” Foulke grunts, neatly tying his cleats together at the laces and heaving them into the depths of the locker.

The kid’s face half-falls, something Foulke can see his peripheral vision. “C’mon, man, it’ll be fun. We can have some fun. Promise!”

Foulke digs out his sneakers and jams his feet into them without untying them, his heels squashing down the backs. He rolls his feet until the backs pop up again, then very calculatingly raises his eyes to the kid’s face. Eye contact. The little fucker is hopeful and trying to look sexily cool, which is pathetic on several different levels, so far as Foulke is concerned.

“I’m not fuckin’ interested,” he says, bland and calm as though it’s the most obvious thing in the world, “in your fun.”

He doesn’t even wait to see the way the kid crumples before turning neatly on his heel and striding out of the clubhouse. He knows how it goes down and, as with a ball off the bat destined for the turnpike, he doesn’t have turn around to watch his handiwork through to its destructive finale.

\---

He’s watching the end of Saturday Night Live at 1 am when the phone rings. Foulke automatically picks it up and flips it open, wincing when he hears the quavery voice of the kid saying his name down the other end of the line. He should have checked the caller ID first.

The kid, surprisingly, doesn’t sound drunk. He just sounds contrite, and a little scared. It transpires that he had gotten a ride to an unfamiliar bar with Tavarez, who had then disappeared with a girl and his car, leaving Papelbon stranded and standing on a street corner, unwilling to call and worry his wife, but more than willing to call and bother Foulke.

The description of the place sounds familiar to Foulke and, sighing, he gets into his truck and heads towards it. He circles around a few likely-looking blocks before he spots the kid, standing yellow under a lone streetlight like a fucking target, arms folded tightly and nervously to his chest, head twitching side to side, his entire attitude screaming _Mug me!_

He pulls up and the kid wordlessly gets in. As Foulke pulls away from the curb he can see that the kid is shaking, his knees jittering and his hands drumming in a little curled-together knot in his lap. Foulke rolls his eyes and aims for the kid’s house.

Halfway there the kid mumbles something, sounding plaintive. “Speak up,” Foulke grunts, in no mood for guessing games.

“Don’t take me home,” the kid whispers, nearly pleading. Foulke shoots a surprised glance at him and the kid hangs his head, stares at his twisting hands. “I. I can’t go home like this.”

The car passes under a high bright streetlight and the interior is briefly illuminated. Foulke can see the kid clearly for just an instant, but it’s enough to realize that, in addition to the shaking, there’s a nervous flush on his face, a scratch on his cheek, a certain disarray to his clothes, and what looks suspiciously like a bite mark on his neck.

It’s all Foulke can do to stifle his laughter. “What,” he asks, amusement bleeding through. “Bad pickup? Left a few too many marks to explain away for the little lady?”

The kid doesn’t say anything, still staring at his hands and shaking slightly. “What?” Foulke asks again, laughter starting to edge into his voice. “C’mon. I’ve been around the block. She scratch your back while you were fuckin’ her, or what?”

“I didn’t know what to expect,” Papelbon whispers, his eyes still lowered and his voice unsure.

Foulke thumps the wheel and takes the turning to his apartment instead of the one that would take him to the kid’s house. “Aw, c’mon now. You ain’t never fucked a rowdy groupie before?”

“Didn’t know who I was. I don’t. Don’t think he was a groupie.”

“What the fuck were you doin’ botherin’ with someone who wasn’t...” Wait. Foulke backtracks the kid’s statement in his mind, mental rewind whirring. “Wait. _He_?”

Christ. He hadn’t thought the kid was that much, well, _like that_ , enough that he’d be going in that direction when he hit the bars by himself.

The kid doesn’t say anything for a long time and Foulke has to take his eyes from the road when they pull up to a red light to look at him. The red shine on the edge of Papelbon’s profile makes the rest of him look sickly pale. His head is still hanging, his hands still wringing nervously. The light turns green and Foulke sees it in the change of color on the tip of Papelbon’s nose.

“Kid?” he asks, aware that he’s treading on slightly unstable ground now.

Papelbon makes some small movement that Foulke sees out of the corner of his eye, but they’re back on Storrow Drive now and Foulke has lived here long enough to know that you only take your eyes off the road on Storrow if you have suicidal tendencies. The kid shifts again and when he finally speaks it’s slightly muffled, as though he’s put a hand over his face.

“Thought I wanted to,” he mumbles. “Well. Did. But then. Well. Didn’t.”

Foulke blinks at the road. He doesn’t really know what to say. This is not something he ever signed on for, no sir, and he’s got no fucking idea how to deal with it. He tries to sneak a glance over at the kid again, but Papelbon is staring out the window and all Foulke can see is the back of his head.

They drive in silence for a minute, Foulke mulling it over. He’s not sure how this goes; is he supposed to try to find out exactly what happened, is that important? Or is he supposed to avoid the subject altogether for the rest of their lives? Eventually he decides that it’s more vital to get everything clear than to handle the kid with, well, kid gloves. If the fucker really wants to be a closer he can’t be too soft anyhow.

Francona would be so proud. Being a Closer, Lesson Number One.

“What did. Uh.” It turns out to be a little harder to put into words than Foulke had thought, especially when he’s driving at the same time. He can just barely see that the kid has turned his head a little bit, paying attention. He navigates a tricky turn of the road and marshals his thoughts as best he can.

“What did. OK. I mean. You didn’t want to, so, you, uh. Didn’t. Right? Or.”

A taxi cuts him off and Foulke slams on the brakes, whaling on the horn, grateful for the distraction. He drives on another mile fuming and growling about the fucking awful drivers that get licensed to operate cabs in this fucking city, a fucking crime is what it oughta be, if you’re that bad a driver and still getting paid to do just that.

He quiets down and the kid makes a small noise, a tiny clearing of his throat.

“Did,” he says, voice no bigger than the tiny sound before it.

Hard to ask now, of course, but he can’t be delicate. It’s not in his nature, and it shouldn’t be in the kid’s nature either. Hard to ask, but he’s doing him a favor here, somewhere down the line.

“What, when you say, uh, _did_ , what d’you mean by that?”

There’s a pause filled with an awful kind of anticipation and in the unquiet quiet Foulke pulls into the tiny parking lot behind his building, holding his breath as his truck trundles down the short alleyway leading to it as he always does, taking every pain possible to make sure he doesn’t shear the sideview mirrors off, millimeters away from the brick.

He puts the truck in park and turns off the ignition. The key dangles from the steering wheel column and the silence deepens marginally.

The kid is looking at his hands again, for all his past bravado still embarrassed to look at Foulke and say the kind of things he, in better circumstances, might want to say. He looks somehow reduced, finally looking like the kid Foulke calls him in his mind.

Flying by the seat of his fucking pants here, Christ. Foulke reaches over and very gently squeezes the kid’s shoulder, as companionly and without extraneous connotation as he can possibly make it.

There’s a tiny sniffle and the kid’s shoulders square up under Foulke’s palm. He leaves his hand there. He can be that generous, this once.

“Saw him at the bar,” the kid says, so quiet and low that at first Foulke thinks it’s just night noises melting into the truck cab interior air. “Looked at each other, bar bathroom, well. Y’know how it is. Thought I. Well. Makin’ out, was OK, got. Y’know. Worked up some. An’ I guess, guess I wasn’t sure how it was gonna go from there, cause I ain’t. Well. An’ he kinda. Got me kneelin, an’ I said I didn’t know how or nothin’, and he just. Well. Put me to it.

An’ I mighta struggled ‘gainst it a little but. Didn’t never say no. Not exactly. So I guess it ain’t. Well.”

Foulke doesn’t know too much about it but he does know that this sounds pretty much like what Papelbon is saying it isn’t. He’s never been a particularly sensitive guy, but back in ’04 Kapler had made them all sit in on one of his wife’s little lecture things about, Christ, domestic abuse and shit, the kind of stuff she’d gone through before she met Kapler. Foulke hadn’t paid very much attention to it at the time, had had the feeling that it was mostly directed at Derek Lowe, at whom Kapler had glared the whole way through, because they all knew what Lowe was getting up to, in that know-but-don’t-know kind of way that goes on in baseball, and he was the one who needed to hear that that shit wasn’t cool.

It comes back to him a little bit now, though, and he’s not clear on the legal details or anything, of course, but he’s pretty fucking sure that there was something in there about not needing to say the word ‘no’ to make it, well, bad. Or whatever.

He squeezes the kid’s shoulder more firmly and studies the way he squares up even more. It’s almost enough to make a guy proud, and Foulke isn’t at all used to that.

\---

Foulke gets the kid inside and digs into the brandy he keeps for particularly rough outings to calm the kid’s nerves some. He pulls out the futon and smooths sheets over it quick and neat, making it clean and welcoming. He pulls out a new toothbrush from his bathroom cabinet and puts it on the side of the sink, waving it at the kid, red, alright? Mine’s blue. Don’t mix ‘em up. He makes sure the kid gets into bed and retires to his own bedroom, stripping down to his boxers and falling almost immediately into a deep but uneasy sleep.

Some time later, everything dark and heavy with night, he wakes to the sound of water running. There’s a fat wedge of yellow triangling out from the direction of the bathroom door, and Foulke rolls onto his back, staring sightlessly at the ceiling. The kid is brushing his teeth, scrubbing the brush around and spitting, returning to scrubbing, spitting again, over and over and over.

Neon green numbers next to the bed declare it to be 4 am.

Nearly half an hour later, the brushing finally stops.

A soft shuffling sound sheepishly approaches his bed. Foulke rolls onto his side and rubs his eyes clear, a dark blob at his side resolving itself fitfully into the kid, standing there wringing his hands again and looking as upset as a shadowy indistinct blob can look in the wee hours of the morning.

With a deep groan Foulke rolls over so his back is to the kid, freeing up half the bed. The kid climbs in and presses up against Foulke’s shoulder blades. He can feel the kid shaking violently. With another irritated groan he rolls back over and sleepily wraps his arms around Papelbon, pulling him to his chest and hoping the kid is too tired and fucked up to bother doing anything stupid.

The kid presses close in a pathetically desperate way, shrinking into Foulke despite his size. His face gets close to Foulke’s and there’s a weird scent, overwhelming mint and strangely metallic. Weary as he is, it takes Foulke a minute to place the smell.

He sits up abruptly and slaps at the lamp next to his bed until he hits the small button that powers it. In the dim light he glares down at Papelbon, who has his arms wrapped around Foulke’s waist and a startled look in his eyes.

“Open,” Foulke growls, tapping the kid on the mouth. “Show me.” Papelbon’s eyes widen further, but he obediently parts his lips a little.

Of course. The kid has brushed his gums bloody.

With another groan that’s half exasperation and half pity, Foulke gently disentangles the kid and goes into the kitchen. He returns with a glass of water, a teaspoon of salt mixed in, and a cooking bowl. He makes the kid sit up and gargle with it, spitting occasionally into the bowl, water there pretty rosy pink. The kid’s eyes tear up at the sting of the salt and he makes protesting noises far in the back of his throat, but Foulke is adamant, because he does know best, and if this is what being a veteran means, well, so be it.

Eventually the water entering the bowl runs mostly clear and he lets the kid fall back, completely exhausted. He throws everything into the sink and eases in next to Papelbon, damned if he’s going to be freaked out of his own fucking bed.

The kid’s arms wrap around him again, pulling him close and tight, and Foulke is far too tired to think of how awkward this could be in the morning.

\---

The summer grows hot everywhere but Boston, cold wet air still blowing over Fenway and whipping around the high yellow foul poles. Coming home from a west coast road trip is a little like coming back to a different country, Africa to England or something like that. Foulke vaguely dreads coming home, because the fans are much harsher when they all know his name.

The kid loves it, though. The cheers had started the season loud and have only gotten louder as it goes on. It’s getting so that he gets as much applause as a starter, as much as David Ortiz when he steps up to bat.

Travis Hafner nervously toes at the plate and Papelbon shrugs off his jacket, dumping it onto the bench next to Foulke in a pile of crinkled red. He turns to Foulke and offers a brilliant grin, apropos of nothing, before nodding at the bullpen catcher and jogging out the door, taking the long trip in from the outfield in easy strides.

The crowd is on its collective feet, screaming and clapping, tiny children raised up by parents and standing on seats, craning their necks for a glimpse of this mythical man, a hero in unlikely 58.

Foulke stands and leans on the wall to watch. Hafner dances up on the balls of his feet uncomfortably, swings mightily through the pitch as it whizzes by. The crowd roars as one. Varitek, behind the plate, nods at Papelbon and rises up on his haunches, calling the next fastball high. Hafner swings straight through it again, unbalancing himself and twisting around, cleats scoring the orange dirt and making long brown stripes.

Foulke watches the red satin numerals on the back of the kid’s jersey glint dully under the ballpark lights as the material ripples through his pitching motion. Hafner stubbornly refuses to swing at the next pitch and gets caught with his bat on his shoulder, the ball sailing tidily through the inside corner. The umpire pumps his arms sharply and Varitek points to the kid before sending the ball back to him.

The brilliant grin of the kid is superimposed on the whole scene, green grass and orange dirt and white-clad teammates, riot of color in the crowd. Foulke blinks and blinks and blinks again but he can’t get rid of it, it’s shading over everything like an afterimage burned into his retinas.

He stares at the banks of lights high above the field until his head swims and there are bright painful squiggles dotting his vision, but it still won’t disappear, the kid’s stupid fucking smile brighter even than a hundred thousand watts of diamond-illuminating electricity.

\---

“Come out and have some fun with us, man,” the kid says, high off yet another game, yet another save.

Foulke nods silently and doesn’t have to be persuaded.

\---

It’s a club this time, the sort of trendy place with a lot of black paint and brushed metal surfaces, the bar on a level overlooking the thronging dance floor. The bar has rows and rows of bottles at the back of it, the wall lit bright neon blue and the bottles making dark silhouettes in elegant flowing forms. The music is thumping and electronic and Foulke cannot recall a time where he felt more out of place than this, not even when he went out with Manny.

The kid edges onto the dance floor, along with Youkilis and Willie Harris and Jon Lester, one of the recent call-ups, another kid trying to fill a man’s spot on the team. Foulke ignores all the absurdly colored cocktails around him and orders a beer, which he nurses slowly, daring anyone around him to enjoy their drinks more. He talks to Timlin for a while, until a forward brunette slides her hand over Timlin’s wrist and Timlin hops off his stool with a casual nod and a wink.

Foulke snorts noiselessly to himself and gets up, dangling his beer by the bottleneck between his fingers. He walks up to the sleek chromed railing and leans on it, the dance floor undulating below him, dark shifting areas splashed with lights in magenta and green.

He spots Youkilis right away, easy, his bald head shining like a lighthouse and his jerky, uncoordinated dancing easy to recognize. He watches Youkilis jerk up to a couple of calculatedly bored-looking girls and get mercilessly ignored, which amuses him for a few minutes, watching and contenting himself with cataloging everything that Youkilis is doing wrong, starting with his loudly obnoxious shirt and ending with his open-mouthed breathing.

He scans for Harris but can’t find the slender slip of him in the crowd. Lester he notices at the edge of the mass of people, leaning on the wall and catching his breath, a red-head leaning next to him and keeping one finger hooked in his pocket. Foulke lets a couple of the lights pass over them before deciding she’s obviously the kind of red that comes out of a little box in the local CVS and losing interest.

His eyes slide across the crowd again and, wholly against his will, light up against Papelbon, dancing with abandon near the opposite edge of the floor. There’s little grace to his movements, but there’s a certain freedom and lack of self-consciousness in it that makes Foulke grimace. It’s too open for his tastes; the kid ought to be careful, that fucking open and who knows what’ll come in.

Timlin clatters up against the rail next to Foulke, breathless and smug, and Foulke spends a minute rolling his eyes and sarcastically clanking beers with him. When he looks back down he can’t see the kid anymore. He frowns and scans the area carefully, suddenly catching sight of his back, weaving through the few people between him and the shadowy area next to the dance floor, a few scattered tables and the hall leading to the bathrooms.

With a lurch in his stomach Foulke watches the kid run up against the back of a guy in front of him, a middlingly tall guy with a rounded, solid look to him, tight black jeans and the sort of weird shimmery club shirt that makes Foulke think of dead fish.

The kid giggles and presses his arm to the guy’s side, mouth moving in probable apologies. The guy turns his head and says something to the kid, who smiles and says something back.

Timlin is drawling next to him, a low easy stream of one-sided conversation, but all Foulke can process is the kid, a floor and a hundred people below him, throwing an arm over the shoulders of the guy in the dead minnow shirt and walking into the darkness near the bathrooms like they’re best friends, and it’s no big deal at all.

\---

The kid shows up at the park the next day an hour late, rushing in looking tousled and hurried. Francona narrows his eyes and spits in the corner and glares at Foulke until he sighs deeply, obviously, and pulls the kid into the video room, kicking the door shut.

The kid perches on the edge of the cheap plastic table they’ve got in there, the legs wobbling a little under his weight. Foulke can see a new mark just under his collar, a hint of purple bruising peeking out.

He sneers, exposing teeth, and marches right up to the kid, gets right in his face, fisting his hands and resting his knuckles on the table on either side of the kid’s legs. The kid’s eyes go wide and he leans back minutely, surrendering the space and going exactly where Foulke wants him. Kid’s already scared. Good.

“The fuck you doin?” Foulke growls, low but clear. “Comin’ in late like that? Fuckin’ around too much last night? _Fuckin’_ too much last night?”

The kid flushes crimson but gains a sullenly defiant set to his jaw. “I was havin’ fun. So I came in late, once. It’s not like I missed the game or nothin’.”

“Fun? Is that what you’re callin’ it?” The sneer is becoming more pronounced and, hell, Francona _wants_ him to slap some sense into the kid, that’s why he sent him in here. Foulke is nothing if not good at being cruel to be kind.

“How can you do that shit and call it fun after what happened last time?”

The kid opens his mouth to reply, gapes, closes it again. Foulke presses on, watching closely for a weakness he can snag onto.

“Huh? Huh? Didn’t seem to be havin’ fun _last_ time. Or maybe you like that now? That what you get off on now?”

The kid gapes again, surprised and helpless. “What?” Foulke snarls. “Don’t act all fuckin’ shocked. You like that shit? That’s your own fuckin’ problem. But when you bring it into here by bein’ late and comin’ in a mess, that’s a fuckin’ problem for all of us.”

“Don’t,” the kid protests, weakly. “I don’t. It wasn’t like that this time.”

Foulke raises one eyebrow challengingly and the kid gains confidence, the sullenness coming back to his posture. “Hey. Fuck you. It wasn’t. It was _good_.”

“How can you do that shit again? Wouldn’t that turn you right the fuck off it? If you had any kinda sense?” Foulke puts all the disbelieving scorn he can muster into his voice, laying it on thick, but the kid just sneers back at him now.

“I wasn’t just _experimentin’_ that time. I’ve been _practicing_ , since. I’m gettin’ _good_. Maybe that’s what I like, you ever thoughta that?”

Foulke pretends to think, rolling his eyes sarcastically to the ceiling, his nose inches away from the kid’s own. “Hmm. No, maybe I didn’t, cause maybe you got a fuckin’ _wife_. What about _her_ , huh?”

“ _Fuck you_ ,” the kid hisses, shoving Foulke in the chest. “Fuck, fuck you, you can’t say a damn thing about my wife, you don’t know shit about, you cheated all over the place. You don’t know a damn thing. Fuck you.”

“If you’re gay,” Foulke says, smugly, lingering over the word ‘gay’, drawing it out, “show everyone some fuckin’ balls. You shouldn’t be stringing the poor bitch along like that.”

He doesn’t have any real object here, except to punish Papelbon sufficiently for coming in late and incurring Francona’s displeasure. Beyond that he just wants to see the little fucker squirm. Teach him a thing or two about taking a job for which he is not truly prepared.

The kid starts up at the word ‘bitch’ and grabs the front of Foulke’s shirt, shoulders broadening furiously, the back of his neck flushing to match his face.

“Don’t you fucking _dare_ talk about her like that! I don’t! I’m not!”

Foulke takes advantage of the kid’s grasp on his shirt, pushes forward and the kid can’t back away, his hand locked up and Foulke so close already. He grabs the back of the kid’s head brutally and mashes their lips together, catching the kid’s mouth open in surprise and clicking their teeth one set against the other, enamel slide, shoving his tongue in and turning things quickly wet.

He kisses him hard, keeping forward pressure, keeping the kid pressing back and scrambling for metaphorical footing, never getting a toehold. He kisses him until the kid has both hands in Foulke’s shirt, trying to pull him closer, desperately, his mouth quivering as he tries to get air, his legs swinging out and trying to hook around Foulke, pull him closer yet.

Foulke pulls back as abruptly as he had gone in, leaving the kid gasping frantically, mouth wet and puffy and eyes wild. He carefully pries the kid’s hands from his shirt and steps back, unruffled and cool as ice.

“Sure,” he says, controlling his voice tightly and making certain it’s smooth, cold, comprehensible. “Sure. Not gay.”

Papelbon makes a tiny squeaking noise, looking like a lost puppy teetering on the edge of the table.

“Have fun bein’ not gay, but if you fuck around on team time again, it’s Tito who’ll be hearin’ ‘bout how not gay you are.” Foulke turns, leaving without looking back, something he’s getting real good at doing.

It’s his moment of triumph. He’s beaten the kid at his own game and he’s left him hollow and broken behind him. And Foulke _does_ feel triumphant, kind of, but the pleased swooping sensation in his gut is mixed in with something else, something he can’t exactly place but doesn’t like having there.

He wonders if it’s possible to feel the absolute best and the absolute worst he’s felt in years as the exact same time, for the exact same reason. He wonders if maybe that means he’s not entirely sane.

\---

The kid doesn’t look at Foulke for two weeks, but he doesn’t come in late again and Francona pulls Foulke aside to thank him for setting the kid straight, it was damn good of you to keep him from having to go through the same kinda shit you did, real big of you, real proud of you, Foulkie.

Foulke nods and grins falsely. Not _quite_ the same kinda shit he got caught up in, no mistresses drawing acrylic fingernails down his back or small son blinking in confusion when mommy starts shouting. But Francona doesn’t need to know that.

It’s given Foulke the reputation, in the manager’s eyes, of being a good teammate and a helpful kind of guy, an idea Foulke is not too quick to dissolve. It’s a tidy bit of trickery and he should feel better about it than he does.

\---

Another month passes unremarkably, Boston still under fitfully raining clouds, but now they’re as far north as baseball goes, up in Toronto, where it doesn’t matter what the weather is. The roof of the Rogers Centre is crisscrossed with girders and Foulke spends much of the game staring up at them, trying to count rivets from his seat in the bullpen. The starters are plodding along tolerably well and Papelbon is closing games out easy as ever. Foulke has nothing better to do.

Coco Crisp, fresh off the DL, his fingers wrapped in white tape, hits the game-winning single and in a move of relieved largesse invites the entire team to a series of drinks at the hotel bar, on his tab. Beer is beer and with the whole team there Foulke can be relatively sure of being left to his own devices, he has no reason not to join in.

It’s a simple enough matter to ignore the clumps of Red Sox around tables and to sit on a high stool at the bar itself like any average hotel patron. The beer is cold and unobjectionable and he’s halfway enjoying himself, anonymous in the noise, actually pulled some Canadian tail the night before, feeling generally good about life, if he doesn’t think about baseball.

The kid hasn’t spoken to him since that day in the video room, so Foulke is surprised when he feels a tap on his shoulder and turns around to see the kid standing there. He’s knotted his hands together and is wringing them almost unconsciously, a sign that he’s upset, something Foulke wishes he didn’t immediately note and remember.

“Can, can we talk? I’ve gotta... you’re the only... can we?”

Foulke stares hard at him for a minute, watches him squirm under his gaze. He turns and signals to the bartender to put his drinks on Crisp's room bill, finishes his beer in one long, practiced gulp and gets up without a word.

They ride the elevator up in silence and Papelbon leads the way to his room in silence, gesturing Foulke in ahead of him. He closes and locks the door, his back to Foulke, and when he turns around Foulke is dismayed to see that the kid is close to tears.

"I can’t, god,” he chokes, covering his face with his hands while Foulke stands uncomfortably before him, “I can’t keep on with this, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t keep on, I don’t know what to do, I don’t, I know you don’t want, don’t wanna hear it, you’re the only one who knows, I can’t.”

 _Pathetic_ , Foulke thinks, and he says as much. “You expect to be a closer with that kinda weak attitude?” he growls. He doesn’t even really know what the kid is talking about but, Christ, he doesn’t have to. “You expect if you can let shit get to you like that you’ll be able to make it on the mound?”

The kid tears his hands from his face and yells at Foulke, blotchy-cheeked, “Being a closer doesn’t mean having no, no fucking emotions at all!” He’s shaking where he stands, emotionally out of control, while Foulke stands still as stone and easy as anything, regardless of the dual-twanging of his heart, the callous laughter at the breakdown and the sharply warring desire to take the kid in his arms, wrap him up and tell him it’ll all be OK. He thinks it’s pretty fucking obvious who has the better handle on themselves, who has a better handle on what it is to be a closer.

“What’s the fuckin’ problem?” he asks, snidely. “Don’t like bein’ in the closet? Getting’ sicka lyin’ to your wife? That ain’t my problem.”

“You’re the only one who _knows_!” Papelbon cries, back to plaintive. “I can’t fucking tell anyone else! I can’t _do_ this!”

It strikes Foulke, all of a sudden, that the kid thinks he’s the only one on the team interested in that kind of shit. Manny and Millar were never as demonstrative in 2005 as they had been the year before, the kid had only been up for something like 20 games then anyhow, and now Millar isn’t on the team. The kid, incredibly, has no idea about Manny. Not that he supposes Manny would be any great help to talk to, when Foulke considers it, but it still gives him pause.

The kid takes his silence for unconcern and makes a noise like a wounded cat. “How can you be so fucking _indifferent_?” he says, almost screams, way too loud, heedless of the thin hotel walls, their teammates roomed all around them.

Foulke cocks an eyebrow at him and sneers again. “Because I’m the one with a closer’s attitude, _kid_.” Stupid fucking question.

Papelbon makes the frustrated noise again and snaps, charging at Foulke and catching him off guard. They fall to the bed and Foulke finds himself momentarily pinned, on the bottom. He grabs at the kid’s wrists and tries to hold them apart, away from him, Papelbon looking all kinds of crazed and probably wanting to bash his head in.

The kid drops all of his weight on Foulke, who can feel his breathe rush out of him in a surprised _whoosh_ , his grip loosening just enough for the kid to wrench his hands free and grab Foulke’s head on either side, clamping him in place. Reverse of the video room, here, and Foulke has a second to stare into the pale wild eyes of the kid before his mouth is clamped down on and he’s being kissed.

Already airless from the kid forcing his breath out of his chest and he can’t get any more air with the kid suctioned to his lips, tongue lashing at the inside of Foulke’s mouth and making his body think he’s swallowing something, keeping his trachea closed. He struggles for a minute but black dots dance in front of his eyes and everything goes dull headachy gray.

He comes to with a start, not knowing how much time has passed, his pants missing and the kid licking at his dick. Foulke inhales deeply, his lungs burning and dry coughs racking through his body, but the kid is undeterred, holding Foulke down at the hips with both hands and swallowing him all at once, making Foulke inject a shout into his coughing fit.

Foulke tries to get his hands down to shove the kid’s head away but he’s still fuzzed and weak from passing out and he’s barely coordinated enough to breathe, let alone do anything forceful with his limbs. The kid is sucking him with a brutal kind of efficiency, like it’s a race. He must feel Foulke’s hands flutter at his hair, though, because he pauses and looks up, eyes still wild and cheeks still flushed red as their livelihood.

“Push,” he rasps, voice rough-edged, and Foulke blinks uncomprehendingly. “C’mon, your hands, get, on my head.”

Unsure, Foulke lightly cups a hand around the side of the kid’s face, concentrating hard to make the fingers curve right. The kid’s eyebrows pucker down in a frown and he shakes his head slightly.

“No, c’mon. Shove.”

Brain still catching up with current events, Foulke stares. The kid shifts under his gaze and drops his own eyes down to Foulke’s dick again, which is half-hard, but through no fault of Foulke’s.

“Shove, c’mon, that’s how you do it.”

Finally, finally Foulke catches on to what’s going on here. Christ, so fucked up, he did not ask to be thrust into this kind of shit, but with the kid it seems like it’s always ending up in Foulke’s lap anyhow-- just, this time a bit more literally.

He gets his hand a bit more manageable and presses it firmly against the top of the kid’s head, shoving him out of his lap. The kid looks up like he can’t believe Foulke would stop him in the middle of this, and Foulke may be a little bit drunk, a little bit horny, a little bit an asshole, but this is too fucking wrong for even him.

“That’s not how you do it, kid,” he says, sense of right and wrong skewed but anchored _somewhere_ , in the final estimation.

“Yeah it is,” the kid stubbornly replies, tiny pucker forming between his eyebrows, belying his certainty.

“No. Maybe that’s how you do it when you’re suckin’ off random guys in bathrooms,” (the kid winces visibly), “but it ain’t how it’s _done_.”

The kid still looks like he doesn’t want to believe it, so Foulke frowns at him gravely. “C’mon. If your wife was suckin’ you off, would you be shovin’ at her head and tellin’ her to hurry it the fuck up?”

“No! No, but. This is. Guys.”

Foulke sits up, carefully easing his hips out from under the kid, piling a lump of rucked-up sheets over himself. The kid looks empty, lost, adrift somewhere behind his eyes.

“Just cause it’s guys, that don’t mean it’s any different than how you should treat a chick.”

Papelbon puffs up indignantly. “I ain’t a chick! I don’t, I ain’t askin’ to be treated like a fucking chick!”

“No, but you ain’t supposed to be gettin’ half raped every time neither.”

And there it is. Foulke’s said it, the word that they’d been so assiduously avoiding ever since that first time, the kid coming back to his apartment shaking down to his fingertips. It hangs now in the air between them, flat and heavy, the sound dying slow in the hotel room and seeming to linger long after it should have floated away.

“It’s not,” Papelbon whispers, folding into himself at the foot of the bed, a thousand miles away from the star pitcher pumping his fist under the madly adoring gaze of an entire ballpark. “It’s not. I want it.”

“That don’t make it OK,” Foulke says, strong and calm as he knows how to be. A small tear escapes from the corner of the kid’s eye and straggles down his cheek without his noticing. Foulke doesn’t even have the heart to upbraid him for it, instead opening his arms with a grunt and letting the kid swarm up the bed, pouring himself into them.

The kid bites Foulke’s shoulder through his shirt, teeth digging in to keep himself together. Foulke grimaces at the wall and says nothing. It’s not like he’ll be pitching much anyways, may as well offer up his shoulder to the ability of another.

Even a closer, he supposes, has to break down sometimes. Just so long as he shows can use it. So long as he’s got the understanding that he’ll come back stronger.

\---

Just for the hell of it, Foulke is warming up before the game in the outfield, throwing a baseball at the wall and letting it carom back in his direction. He hates playing in Oakland, it makes him feel old and reminds him of stupid things he doesn’t need to think about, but of course it’s not the sort of thing he can avoid.

Some fans in green and gold are leaning over the wall near him, staring expressionlessly at him like lizards, little kids with their mouths hanging heedlessly open in the heat. He sets his jaw hard until his teeth ache, and bounces the ball off the wall again, scraping the tops of the blades of close-shorn grass with his glove to scoop it up on the rebound.

There’s a soft cough behind him and he doesn’t need to turn around to see who it is, starting to recognize the small indicators just through osmosis, not particularly wanting to but too tired of fighting. It feels like he gave up long ago.

He throws the ball a few more times, putting the spin on it just right so that it skips directly back to his feet, lateral movement streamlined and cut to a minimum.

“How d’you do that?” Papelbon asks curiously.

“It’s all in the stride,” Foulke explains, only just loud enough for the kid to hear, not bothering to change the direction of his gaze. “And keepin’ your shoulders in a line.”

“Show me,” the kid demands, the familiar entitled voice of someone whose professional curiosity won’t be denied.

All the Oakland fans are watching and Foulke is thinking about when he was the kid’s age, cocksure and stupid as all fuck, tantrums on the field and in the clubhouse and at home. No one told him shit. It’s a wonder his marriage lasted as long as it did; it’s a wonder he stayed in baseball at all.

The fans are watching and Foulke turns just his head, shoulders still open to the wall, raising his voice just enough.

“What do you say?”

The kid stares at him. The fans stare at them both. Foulke ignores them and stares right back at the kid. He’ll be damned if he’s going to be freaked out of his own fucking former home park.

A long pause later, the air moving slowly, Papelbon clasps his hands theatrically in front of him, making his eyes absurdly huge, his voice de-aged by 10 years and snottily begging.

“Please?”

Foulke gives him a sneering smile that still somehow manages to feel sincere, not quite as warm as the haze-streaked city air, but holding its own. He shakes out his wrists and toes the grass to demonstrate. The kid comes in close behind him, watching attentively and asking questions any self-aware pitcher with a youthful dose of inquisitiveness would ask.

The air between his back and Papelbon’s chest charges up, staticky, ionized, but Foulke ignores it and throws at the wall, throws again, arm snapping forward from the shoulder, the elbow, smoothly repeated. He can almost hear electricity crackle, making the small hairs on the back of his neck stand up, but he concentrates on keeping his delivery consistent and doubts that the fans’ eyes are sharp enough to see it.

\---

Papelbon leans on Foulke, teetering on his stool, two games lost and everyone on the team too dejected to venture beyond the hotel bar, even if Francona hadn’t told them not to. Salvage the third, unspoken but on everyone’s mind. Schilling is supposed to be pitching against Barry Zito and he’s locked himself into his room with his notebooks and charts and a direct line to his wife.

Papelbon is jumpy too. Neither of the previous losses are his fault but his nerves are evidently still twitching at the thought of a sweep. Foulke is calming him down as best he can, saying nothing when the kid gestures for a drink, another, and telling him stories about what Zito is probably doing to prepare for this start, his stupid fucking hippy shit, chants and trance music piped into the clubhouse so that everyone gets the benefit of it, as determined by, well, Zito.

He finishes telling a particularly good one, about the time Zito’s little plastic Buddha statue got hung from a noose in his locker as a joke. Papelbon is leaning heavily on him, giggling helplessly, pressing his face into the place where Foulke’s shoulder and neck meet. He struggles to catch his breath, hiccupping, and announces that he has to go to the bathroom.

Foulke rolls his eyes, pays the tab for the both of them, and leads the kid up to his hotel room, arm around his waist just to keep him upright, the kid lolling around and manifestly needing it.

Inside, the kid backs him up against the door, pressing the whole length of his body against Foulke and sliding his hands up his sides. Foulke gently reaches between them, his own hands gingerly cupping the kid’s waist and trying to push him off.

“You’re drunk,” he mutters, no longer disturbed, these days, but still not welcoming it.

The kid looks up at him and Foulke is startled to see how clear his eyes are. The kid doesn’t look nearly as drunk as he had been acting mere minutes ago.

“Please,” he says, deferential. “Show me.”

“Show you what?”

He slides one hand down to the fly on Foulke’s jeans. He fingers the button and doesn’t make any overtly aggressive moves, which Foulke supposes is a vast improvement, but the direction this is taking is left in no doubt.

“Show me what it can be like,” Papelbon says, not begging, not crying, not flying all over the place, calm and controlled. Foulke watches him appreciatively, even as he marshals his thoughts against what the kid is asking. He can still, for once, approve of how he’s doing it.

“M’not like that, kid.”

“I know. I know.” The kid is contrite, but something in his voice manages to concede the point without giving up any ground. “Look. I don’t. I don’t have great luck with, well. Guys. I trust you. I want you to.”

Foulke stares at the kid. He doesn’t think he’s done much to incur the kid’s trust, not like that, and surely the kid knows what Foulke used to do with groupies, the stories still floating around the clubhouse when guys are bored and need something to discuss. But there’s no hesitation in the kid’s eyes, no doubt in his stance, no wavering in his palm against Foulke’s ribs.

“Please,” the kid adds, hint of a cheeky smile ghosting across his face. “I know you ain’t-- ain’t like this. I’m only asking this once, I won’t ask again. I just. I want to know how it can be, the first time, so I don’t. So it doesn’t end up like before. I don’t know how else to do it.”

“The first time?” Foulke is starting to get a little bit hysterical, slamming the walls down around himself forcibly, he’s the fucking pro here, he’s not going to panic, he’s not going to get excited, he’s not going to _anything_.

“Want it t’be you,” Papelbon purrs, fingers easing into activity, sliding the button of Foulke’s jeans free and snagging on the zipper. “Know you’ll show me right.”

Christ. Foulke swallows. He can control his emotions, he can control the reactions in his head, but he can’t control the reactions in his pants. There isn’t a closer in the world, superstar or not, who can.

There are some ideas that you object to with every aspect of your being, some things you just never ever want to do. Some of those things you spend the rest of your life not wanting to do. Some of them, though, work their way into your unconsciousness, worm their way into your life, crawl under your skin until your resistance is broken down, your barriers burst, and you haven’t even noticed it.

 _Fucking hell._

Foulke leans back against the door and wets his lips. Papelbon leans in, closing his eyes gratefully and murmuring his thanks into the hollow of Foulke’s throat. He unzips Foulke’s fly and shoves his jeans down his hips, one-handedly undoing his own pants before pressing up against Foulke with a happy, relieved sigh.

Foulke fists one hand in the back of Papelbon’s shirt and hopes, hopes like hell, that he knows enough to get through this.

\---

Moving slow and careful, Foulke drapes himself over Papelbon’s back, reaching one hand around to press it to the kid’s chest, heaving underneath them both.

Papelbon pants and arches his back and Foulke is gripping his hip just to stay in, going at his own pace, deliberate but not too careful, because he’s not going to start treating Papelbon with kid gloves now, when he least needs it.

It’s not unlike trying to find the elusive G-spot of some chick, Foulke thinks, as he minutely shifts his weight, a little more this way, a little more that, biting his own lip bloody to keep from going crazy over it all.

Papelbon suddenly shudders and cries out, pushing back into Foulke unsteadily. Foulke grins smugly behind him, glad to see he’s as good at this as he is at fucking groupies. He keeps his delivery smooth and consistent, behavior ingrained and just as good here as it is on the mound.

Under his hand, Papelbon’s heart jackhammers and Foulke’s palm slides a tiny bit, the kid’s sweat making him slippery, hard to hold onto, intangible.

The incoherent groans and breathy gasps Papelbon had been voicing somehow meld seamlessly into a phrase, repeated over and over.

“Thank you, yeah, yeah, thank you, Keith, thankyouthankyou.”

Foulke lets his hand skid freely, still gripping surely with the other. He skates it down Papelbon’s sternum, over his stomach, fingers splaying until he runs up against something hard and wraps around like it’s himself, a familiar motion at an unfamiliar angle.

Papelbon shudders harder and jerks sharply under Foulke, crying out helplessly, pleading now without words.

Knees a forgotten problem, no benches here, Foulke grins and sets his teeth and like he’s always done, like he’ll always, in his heart, be able to do, brings the game to an overpowering, masterful close.

\---

The DL doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone, least of all to Foulke. The pain was constant, and he would have kept on pitching through it until they were taking him from the field in a stretcher, but Francona notices and decides that enough is enough. It’s not 2004 anymore. He’s only worth keeping out there if he’s got stuff worth, well, keeping.

Foulke clears out his locker, leaving a few things just in case, a spare jersey, his nameplate. But he packs most of it up. Medical attention, that’s what he needs, Francona tells him sternly. Doctors and machines and rehab, far far away from Fenway Park.

He’s never been much of a brainy guy, not into that studying shit like Varitek or anything like that, but Foulke can read the writing on the wall when it’s there to be read.

So he packs most everything away in boxes, stacking haphazard because he’s never been any good at packing. It’s not giving up, it’s not giving in. Not anymore. He might come back, but baseball will move on without him regardless, and he’ll always have his place in it, photos of him leaping on high, arms in the air, plastered all over the history books, printed up in glossy green and red. Joy writ large over all their faces, and long after these past two seasons have faded away, that’s the image that will endure.

He straightens up and stretches his back, looking around the clubhouse. Manny’s got his headphones on in the corner, tapping his foot in what is almost certainly the wrong rhythm. Timlin is arguing with Youkilis over whose camo-patterned shirt belongs to whom. Beckett is hanging over Schilling’s shoulder at the computers, four eyes glued to the screen, while Trot Nixon plays digital solitaire next to them. Ortiz is rubbing preemptive pine tar on the handle of a new bat, joking with Alex Gonzalez in rapid-fire Spanish.

Foulke smiles. He’ll miss this, but he no longer regrets it. He fought so long and so hard, so doggedly and so bitterly, all to keep from losing his spot in the bullpen, and in the end he no longer has it, but it’s not really lost.

Hefting a box on his shoulder he turns to walk out to the parking lot. Outside the clouds have finally parted over Boston and the moon is shining weakly down, the light pale and watery but clear all the same.

He’s halfway to his truck when he hears his name called from the ballpark. He pauses and looks back.

Papelbon is standing in the doorway, bright artificial light streaming out from behind him and making him backlit, a black silhouette with yellow creeping around the edges.

“Take care, alright?” he calls, voice raised just a little, just enough to project out into the nearly empty parking lot.

“Sure,” Foulke says. “O’course.”

“I’ll keep ‘em from giving anyone your locker.”

Foulke laughs, tipping his face up towards the moon. “Don’t strain yourself none.”

“That’s it?” Papelbon calls back, a tiny choke at the center of his voice but he’s mastering himself, he’s holding it together, learning, always learning, Foulke got prouder by the day. “That’s all you got? No more pokes at my attitude or nothin’?”

Foulke studies his outline for a moment, deep hole in the light of the park. He thinks of all the things he could say, and then he thinks of what he will say, what no one ever bothered saying to him.

“Show me,” he says, echoing slightly off the brick sides of Fenway and bouncing back at them, around them. “Show me. Show everyone.”

The silhouette in the door stands taller, its shoulders widening and its chin lifting. Foulke lets himself look at it for another long second before nodding to himself, turning, trudging away to his truck and Christ knows what else.

He holds a grudge as well as anyone, but it was the kid who was the target of his grudge. It was intolerable to think that his job, his fucking _life_ , could be taken over by a kid. That’s never changed. It never will.

He could never allow himself to be sent packing by a fucking kid.

He can turn his back with dignity now, though, walk away with his head held high and not look back, leaving nothing behind but a team full of men.


End file.
